Clarke, Catherine A. M.
Reading Medieval Studies 29: 19-30, 2003.
Clarke discusses the motif of eavesdropping in TC, KnT, and BD. Overhearing (both deliberate and accidental) places speaker and listener in a dialectic relationship.
Argues that spoken recordings of Chaucer's works (and other Middle English writings) are useful in the classroom. Surveys critical attitudes toward such recordings and comments on the products produced by the Chaucer Studio.
Reviews canon, allusion, and literary influence in English literature. Refers to Chaucer as the head of the English canon, discusses Matthew Arnold's thoughts on Chaucer, and reveals limited attention to Chaucer in the 1909 "Harvard Classics"…
Chaucer scholarship provides an example of the need for the correction and reassessment of texts, authorship, chronology, and influences on Middle English literature.
Jones, Timothy S.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Studies the depiction and reception of historical and literary outlaws in England from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, focusing on how borders of various sorts--legal, ethnic, political, social, and religious--define the outlaw identity. Jones…
Watson, Nicholas.
Karen Pratt, ed. Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative: A Festschrift for Elspeth Kennedy (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 89-108.
The relation of Lydgate and Henryson to Chaucer is anxious and competitive; their retellings of TC help canonize Chaucer but also subvert "his authority by criticizing or outdoing him." Lydgate associates Chaucer with Criseyde's falsity and "stands…
Stafford, Kim R.
John Witte, ed. 2084: Looking Beyond Orwell (Portland: Oregon Committee for the Humanities, 1984), pp. 17-21.
Contemplates the notion that "space travel helps us to see what we have on earth," musing upon the Apollo 11 moon landing and a number of literary representations of travel through space, ancient and modern, including Troilus's rise through the…
Leicester, H. Marshall,Jr.
Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, eds. Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 15-26.
Invoking "Derridean models," Leicester examines the problem of evolution of medieval manuscripts. With its possibility of "univocal meaning," "logocentric" oral literary culture flattens out the difference between composer and audience; the scribal…
Boyd, Beverly.
Florilegium 9 (1990, for 1987): 147-54.
Almost all Chaucer's poetry specifically addressed to Mary includes translation, adaptation, or quotations from disparate sources brought together via "collage" technique. This layered effect has precedent in church liturgy and macaronic lyric.
Elliott, Ralph W. V.
Review of English Literature 7.2 (1966): 63-71.
Questions some of critics' claims about the Pardoner (particularly rejecting the claim that he is drunk), and argues that the Pardoner's character and his performance cohere and exhibit his "craft and talent" as well as his efforts "to entertain and…
A personal memoir recording a childhood experience of reading about "Dan" Chaucer in "The Book of Knowledge," leading to an early understanding of the unchanging drives and characteristics of human nature. A childhood neighbor was like the Wife of…
Willocks, Stephanie.
English Journal 85:7 (1996): 122-24.
Advocates imitative role-playing as a way to teach Chaucer. Students select pictures from newspapers and magazines, create characters from the pictures, and develop stories for the characters to tell. Stories are told during an imaginary journey,…
Oldmixon, Katherine Durham.
Dissertation Abstracts International 62:1009A, 2001.
Fourteenth-century English Breton lays, such as "Sir Degaré," "Sir Orfeo," and FranT, displace "Celtic" otherworlds to Brittainy and depict them as exotic, feminine, and supernatural-places of self-discovery that contrast with the domestic and…
Armour-Hileman, Victoria Lee.
Dissertation Abstracts International 50 (1989): 950A.
Three paradigms of the Celtic universe made their way, through either oral or literary tradition, into early English literature, as is shown in "Sir Orfeo," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," passages from four of the tales in CT, Spenser, and…
Minnis, Alastair.
Rita Copeland, ed. The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Vol. 1, (800–1558) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 413-34.
Aligns Chaucer's depictions of classical culture and his attitudes toward pagan belief, arguing that his "remarkable degree of cultural relativism" and his "reluctance to resort to simplistic forms of Christian triumphalism" are "delimited" only by…
Imitative indirect discourse in the portraits of the Monk, Friar, and Parson presents attitudes not Chaucer's in language not his. Examining personae in early tales may alter the pilgrim's portrait or the tone, as when the Merchant's ironic praises…
Crampton, Georgia Ronan.
David A. Richardson, ed. Spenser: Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, and Modern (Cleveland State University, 1977), pp. 132-34. [Microfiche available from the Department of English.]
Spenser and Chaucer both composed subtle, complex closures, spreading out before the audience several endings, like sections of a fan. Many medieval poems ended almost interchangeably in a formulaic prayer for salvation.
Vernon, Matthew X.
Matthew X. Vernon. The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 203-45
Explores ways that John Dryden’s notions of congeniality and the value of the vernacular in his commentary on Chaucer help to clarify Gloria Naylor’s adaptations of Dante’s "Inferno" in "Linden Hills" and of CT in "Bailey’s Café, "identifying in the…
Marshall, Linda E.
Philological Quarterly 56 (1977): 407-13.
Identifies parallels between Chaucer's dream visions and the one depicted in Osbern of Gloucester's "Liber derivationum" or "Panormania": the reading of a book inspires the central dream and there is a significant concern with Macrobius's concept of…
Spencer, Alice.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. Standing in the Shadow of the Master? Chaucerian Influences and Interpretations (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), pp. 160-203.
Bokenham repeatedly refers to himself as an "auctor" as a way to extricate himself from the classicizing, conventional, and paternal shadow of Chaucer.
Thaisen, Jacob.
Boletín Millares Carlo 24-25 (2005-06): 379-94.
Analysis of MS Gg.4.27 of CT, combining a codicological approach with analysis of linguistic aspects such as graphemic and graphetic variants. This multifocal approach helps identify the process of copying as well as the scribal profile.
